urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Question

By adding a few more headers I was able to get the data:

import urllib2,cookielib

site= "http://www.nseindia.com/live_market/dynaContent/live_watch/get_quote/getHistoricalData.jsp?symbol=JPASSOCIAT&fromDate=1-JAN-2012&toDate=1-AUG-2012&datePeriod=unselected&hiddDwnld=true"
hdr = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11',
       'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
       'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3',
       'Accept-Encoding': 'none',
       'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
       'Connection': 'keep-alive'}

req = urllib2.Request(site, headers=hdr)

try:
    page = urllib2.urlopen(req)
except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
    print e.fp.read()

content = page.read()
print content

Actually, it works with just this one additional header:

'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',

This will work in Python 3

import urllib.request

user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7'

url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers"
headers={'User-Agent':user_agent,} 

request=urllib.request.Request(url,None,headers) #The assembled request
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
data = response.read() # The data u need

NSE website has changed and the older scripts are semi-optimum to current website. This snippet can gather daily details of security. Details include symbol, security type, previous close, open price, high price, low price, average price, traded quantity, turnover, number of trades, deliverable quantities and ratio of delivered vs traded in percentage. These conveniently presented as list of dictionary form.

Python 3.X version with requests and BeautifulSoup

from requests import get
from csv import DictReader
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as Soup
from datetime import date
from io import StringIO 

SECURITY_NAME="3MINDIA" # Change this to get quote for another stock
START_DATE= date(2017, 1, 1) # Start date of stock quote data DD-MM-YYYY
END_DATE= date(2017, 9, 14)  # End date of stock quote data DD-MM-YYYY


BASE_URL = "https://www.nseindia.com/products/dynaContent/common/productsSymbolMapping.jsp?symbol={security}&segmentLink=3&symbolCount=1&series=ALL&dateRange=+&fromDate={start_date}&toDate={end_date}&dataType=PRICEVOLUMEDELIVERABLE"




def getquote(symbol, start, end):
    start = start.strftime("%-d-%-m-%Y")
    end = end.strftime("%-d-%-m-%Y")

    hdr = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11',
         'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
         'Referer': 'https://cssspritegenerator.com',
         'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3',
         'Accept-Encoding': 'none',
         'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
         'Connection': 'keep-alive'}

    url = BASE_URL.format(security=symbol, start_date=start, end_date=end)
    d = get(url, headers=hdr)
    soup = Soup(d.content, 'html.parser')
    payload = soup.find('div', {'id': 'csvContentDiv'}).text.replace(':', '\n')
    csv = DictReader(StringIO(payload))
    for row in csv:
        print({k:v.strip() for k, v in row.items()})


 if __name__ == '__main__':
     getquote(SECURITY_NAME, START_DATE, END_DATE)

Besides this is relatively modular and ready to use snippet.

This error usually occurs when the server you are requesting doesn't know where the request is coming from, the server does this to avoid any unwanted visit. You could bypass this error by defining a header and passing it along the urllib.request

Heres code:

#defining header
header= {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) ' 
      'AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) '
      'Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11',
      'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
      'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3',
      'Accept-Encoding': 'none',
      'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
      'Connection': 'keep-alive'}

#the URL where you are requesting at
req = urllib.request.Request(url=your_url, headers=header) 
page = urllib.request.urlopen(req).read()